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The Thorny Path to a National Black Museum

Katricia Gray, left, of Detroit, brought sculptures to Tulani Salahu-Din, a researcher for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, at a November event to appraise possible donations to its collection.Credit
Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

In the late 1970s, when Lonnie G. Bunch III had his first job at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, veterans of the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black squadron, accused the museum of playing down their contributions during World War II. In response, the museum asked some of the African-Americans on staff to allow their faces to be used on mannequins, increasing the “black presence” in its exhibits.

“I didn’t do it,” Mr. Bunch said recently, who was among those asked. “That’s not the way I wanted to be part of a museum.”

Thirty years later Mr. Bunch, and African-American history itself, are part of a Smithsonian museum, but in a very different way. As the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Mr. Bunch, 58, is charged with creating an institution that embodies the story of black life in America.

Since Mr. Bunch was appointed in 2005 — two years after the museum was created by an act of Congress — he and his staff have been racing at full speed, commissioning the building, amassing a collection, reaching out to potential donors and future visitors. But as their deadline approaches, and grand dreams have to be refined into gallery layouts and exhibition plans, they are not only juggling details and a $250 million fund-raising campaign, but also grappling with fundamental questions about the museum’s soul and message.

Among the biggest, of course, is: What story will it tell? As part of the Smithsonian, the museum bears the burden of being the “official” — that is, the government’s — version of black history, but it will also carry the hopes and aspirations of African-Americans. Will its tale be primarily one of pain, focused on America’s history of slavery and racial oppression, and memorializing black suffering? Or will it emphasize the uplifting part of the story, highlighting the richness of African-American culture, celebrating the bravery of civil rights heroes and documenting black “firsts” in fields like music, art, science and sports? Will the story end with the country’s having overcome its shameful history and approaching a state of racial harmony and equality? Or will the museum argue that the legacy of racism is still dominant — and, if so, how will it make that case?

Addressing a topic as fraught as race would be challenging anywhere, but it is particularly tricky within the Smithsonian, a complex of 19 museums that last year got $761 million from Congress. Efforts to tackle difficult topics often become politicized, torn between historians’ desire to treat issues with scholarly detachment and an expectation that the Smithsonian’s role is to honor the nation’s past.

The Air and Space Museum, for example, repeatedly ran into controversy over exhibits of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Meanwhile, the newest Smithsonian museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, has been criticized as being overly reverential and lacking in historical perspective, because it presents its story primarily from an American Indian point of view.

That leads to perhaps the biggest question: Whatever story the museum decides to tell, who will be listening? Most of the African-American museums around the country were originally aimed at a primarily black audience, to teach them about their history and instill pride in their forebears’ resilience and hard-fought battles for freedom. The new institution’s role is different, and not only because African-American history is no longer a neglected field.

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Poll tax receipts were among the family heirlooms submitted to the new African-American museum.Credit
Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

“This is not being built as a museum by African-Americans for African-Americans,” Mr. Bunch said, setting it apart from the museums that have sprung up to celebrate the achievements of various ethnic groups. “The notion that is so important here is that African-American culture is used as a lens to understand what it means to be an American.”

Every topic — the role of African-Americans in the military, or the fight for access to public education in the South — will be examined for how it affected society as a whole, and what it says about America’s evolving definitions of citizenship and equality.

The goal is “to make sure people see this is not an ancillary story, but it’s really the central story of the American experience,” Mr. Bunch said. (The fact that it will be a separate museum, next door to the National Museum of American History, might seem to complicate that message, but Mr. Bunch doesn’t seem bothered by that.)

But even with the country’s first African-American president in office, the topic of race remains a flashpoint in the national conversation, making the project even more complex.

Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, who is on the museum’s committee of scholarly advisers, said that everyone in that group feels the pressure. Most of the people on the committee “never thought a museum like this would take shape,” Mr. Branch said. There’s a feeling that “we really have a huge responsibility,” he added. “We can’t blow this.”

Symbolic Turf on the Mall

The push to create a black museum on the Mall dates to 1915, when a group of black veterans proposed that a memorial to African-Americans be constructed there. Congress actually approved the creation of a black museum in 1929 but refused to provide financing. In the late 1960s, prominent blacks like James Baldwin and Jackie Robinson lobbied Congress to create a national museum of African-American history, but the effort went nowhere.

As a result of the civil rights movement, African-American history museums were started in other cities. By the late 1980s, there were nearly a hundred nationwide, according to a survey by the Association of African American Museums.

But there was still no recognition of African-American history on the symbolic turf of the National Mall. That bothered people like Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, who had been a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights era and who almost as soon as he arrived in the House in 1987 began pushing to create a national African-American museum. His efforts were stonewalled, perhaps most vociferously by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, who in 1994 denounced them on the Senate floor.

“Once Congress gives the go ahead for African-Americans,” Mr. Helms warned, “how can Congress then say no to Hispanics, and the next group, and the next group after that?” (In fact, a commission is studying whether to establish a National Museum of the American Latino as part of the Smithsonian, on the Mall.)

In 2003 the museum was finally authorized by Congress, after winning the support of conservative Republican senators like Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

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An artist’s rendering of the building.Credit
Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup

Even then, another battle had to be fought over its location. The major planning bodies in Washington opposed putting another museum on the Mall, which they considered overcrowded. But to the museum’s supporters, any other location smacked of second-class status. Eventually, the Smithsonian chose a site on the Mall between the National Museum of American History and the Washington Monument.

That the museum would have a particularly delicate task was evident from the start, when the commission appointed by former president George W. Bush to set its direction described it as a “healing space” that would promote racial reconciliation. But what happens if a particular object or exhibition does not seem conducive to reconciliation and healing?

Consider, for example, the handcuffs. They look like any other pair, but they were used by a Cambridge, Mass., police officer when arresting Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor and popular intellectual, in an incident in 2009 that ended in a “beer summit” at the White House with President Obama. The arresting officer, James Crowley, gave them to Mr. Gates, presumably as a peace offering. Last year Mr. Gates announced that he was donating them to the museum.

It was unclear if the museum wanted them. In an interview with a columnist for The Berkshire Eagle, in Pittsfield, Mass., Mr. Bunch said he had originally turned them down, telling Mr. Gates that he would rather have something with a positive message, like the bottles or the table from the summit. The article implied that once Mr. Gates had announced the donation on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” it became too awkward for Mr. Bunch not to take them — a version of events Mr. Bunch disputed when asked about it.

He said he thought the summit was more important, “but then I also realized that the handcuffs would be an interesting way to talk about race in the supposedly post-racial world of the Obama administration. For me it became something that I grew to appreciate.” He said he has not decided whether to display them.

If he does, they will go into a museum that Mr. Bunch has so far roughly divided into thirds. One third will be devoted to historical galleries, anchored by a slavery exhibit. Another will be devoted to culture, dominated by music, with smaller sections given to visual arts and sports. The last third will be devoted to the theme of community. It will recreate 10 to 12 places, from Moton Field in Tuskegee, Ala., where African-American pilots were trained in World War II, to a settlement of escaped slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp between Virginia and North Carolina.

In some cases the museum has acquired actual buildings, like a two-story log cabin built by a black family in Maryland shortly after emancipation. Visitors will be able to use high-tech tools to look up information about their own communities.

Lessons From the Past

Several people involved with the African-American museum said that Mr. Bunch had learned from the experience of the Museum of the American Indian, which opened as the Smithsonian’s newest branch six years ago. Reluctant to impose a narrative written by white anthropologists and historians, the Indian museum largely rejected outside professional scholarship. Its exhibitions, which speak mainly in an American Indian voice, have been criticized as incoherent and plagued by romantic cliché.

Mr. Bunch, by contrast, said he wanted his museum to reflect the best scholarship on black history, no matter who wrote it, and to tell a sweeping narrative from slavery to the present.

A round, bearlike man with a graying beard and twinkling eyes, Mr. Bunch exudes a kind of jolliness — you can imagine him presiding over family gatherings with stories and jokes — and his manner of speaking is mellow and even. As he walked a reporter through the museum’s 15,000-square-foot storage space, part of a larger Smithsonian complex in Maryland, where the museum’s collections are currently being kept, he expressed reverence (for a lace shawl that belonged to Harriet Tubman), enthusiasm (“This is just cool,” he said of a costume from the Broadway musical “The Wiz”), and occasionally solemnity. But even a starkly chilling object, like a Ku Klux Klan banner from the 1920s, didn’t elicit anger or bitterness.

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PULLING TOGETHER THE BITS AND PIECES OF A PAST Lonnie G. Bunch III, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with a hospital schedule categorized by race.Credit
Vanessa Vick for The New York Times

“This is a really important opportunity for us to be able to talk about the other side of American life,” he said of the banner, “which is the fact that for many people, change in African-American communities was something they were virulently against.”

In an autobiographical essay published as part of a collection last year by the American Association of Museums, Mr. Bunch traces his political instincts to a childhood spent in a mostly white town in New Jersey in the 1950s and ’60s. In it, he recalls the casual racism of the time: children who chased him, lobbing racial epithets; a history teacher who said, “So, Lonnie, tell us about Africa”; a football coach who asked to touch his head before a practice because “rubbing the head of a Negro is good luck.” Such experiences, Mr. Bunch writes, taught him how to read people and to adjust his approach accordingly— a talent, he notes, that has served him well as a museum director.

“I acquired an ability to read body language well before I ever heard the phrase,” he writes. “And the skill of ‘reading a room’ has proven quite helpful whether in meetings with museum trustees, members of Congress, potential donors, or curatorial colleagues.”

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It also no doubt proved useful on the listening tour of black America on which Mr. Bunch embarked after landing the director’s job. In Florida a group of museum leaders urged him to include the story of Harry T. Moore, an N.A.A.C.P. leader in Brevard County, who was killed in a bombing on Christmas Day, 1951. In St. Louis members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority told him not to ignore the role of women in the civil rights movement. In his hometown, Belleville, N.J., the crowd — some of whom had known his parents and grandparents — reminded him that they wanted to see their local stories represented too.

Mr. Bunch also commissioned focus groups (of some 900 people, black and white) and reached out to activists. In 2009 he convened a group of former members of the Black Power movement — including the poet and activist Amiri Baraka and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and former member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee — to discuss how the museum should represent the movement.

“They’ve tried to get people to come forward from different sectors of Afro-American life,” Mr. Baraka said.

When the museum opens, whether all the people Mr. Bunch has reached out to will feel that they have been not only heard, but also listened to, remains to be seen. But if some are disappointed, it certainly won’t be for lack of trying on Mr. Bunch’s part.

“He’s always out there, he’s pulling people into the circle,” said Richard Rabinowitz, who organized two highly praised shows about slavery in New York at the New-York Historical Society, and is the curator of the African-American museum’s slavery exhibition, along with Rex Ellis, a member of the museum’s staff.

Mr. Rabinowitz said that Mr. Bunch believed strongly in his museum’s mission, “not because he believes that black people have not been heard enough, but because he believes this is crucial to an understanding of this country for us all.” The clarity of that vision, Mr. Rabinowitz added, and the ability to communicate it are in many ways Mr. Bunch’s greatest assets as a director.

There are people “who are more scholarly, better schmoozers, better fund-raisers, but the ability to articulate for a diverse public the value of understanding this material” is unique, he said. “Everybody in the institution understands what this museum is for, and that is really rare.”

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A series of daguerreotype photographs that will be part of the museum’s collection.Credit
Vanessa Vick for The New York Times

From Attics, a Collection

A record of honorable discharge from the United States Army from 1919. A certificate from the Knoxville Colored High School, stating that a young woman was eligible to enter the ninth grade. A pocket watch.

On a cold Saturday morning in November, William S. Pretzer, a history curator for the African-American museum, sat at a table in the Detroit Public Library and pulled bits and pieces of a family’s history out of a binder. Facing him was Constance Porter, a retired clerk who had brought the mementos to “Save Our African-American Treasures,” an all-day, “Antiques Roadshow”-style event sponsored by the museum. The goal was to encourage people to bring heirlooms from their closets and attics to be assessed by experts. The owners would get advice on how to preserve their keepsakes, and, if anything amazing showed up, the museum just might get an addition to its collection.

While the museum will talk about the achievements of famous African-Americans, from Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters, its curators are also looking for objects that will reflect the experiences of ordinary people.

When Mr. Pretzer pulled out a stack of small slips of paper, his demeanor turned from genial to genuinely excited. The slips were poll tax receipts that Ms. Porter’s grandfather had saved from 1900 to 1908. The tax was one of the methods used throughout the South to discourage blacks from voting, and Mr. Pretzer said it was rare to see actual receipts.

“Everybody talks about them but you don’t see them,” he told Ms. Porter. “This is terrific stuff that a public institution would want.”

Among the acquisitions the museum has made at the “Treasures” events, which have been held so far in cities including Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Charleston, S.C., are a tool kit passed down by three generations of a family of carpenters and the entire contents of a Philadelphia hat shop operated for more than 50 years by Mae Reeves, a black woman. Mr. Bunch said the shop would allow the museum to talk about important themes, like black fashion and the role of African-American women as entrepreneurs.

Building the collection is a challenge, both because many important objects are already in other institutions, and because the museum has just $500,000 in federal money to spend at a time when major historical documents can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

Even other Smithsonian museums have had a head start on collecting African-American history. The National Museum of American History, for example, owns a section of the Woolworth’s lunch counter from Greensboro, N.C., where in 1960 four black students held a sit-in against segregation that galvanized the civil rights movement nationwide. But it won’t be transferring the lunch counter to the African-American museum. Asked why, a spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, Linda St. Thomas, said there was concern that stripping the American history museum of its African-American material would leave it as “the white museum.”

So far, the African-American museum has acquired roughly 11,000 objects, either by donation or purchase. Mr. Bunch plans to acquire 20,000 more before the museum opens in a building that the Tanzanian-born architect David Adjaye designed to evoke a crown motif from ancient Yoruban sculpture. Mr. Bunch has to raise half of the $500 million construction budget privately, which is why the museum has named an advisory council that includes black luminaries like Oprah Winfrey; Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Citigroup; and Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television. The museum’s annual operating budget is currently $13 million, and is expected to increase to roughly $40 million by the opening.

The museum has acquired its own emotionally resonant relics, including the glass coffin in which Emmett Till was buried (he was exhumed in 2005 as part of a criminal investigation into his murder and reburied in another coffin); the dress that Rosa Parks was sewing at the time she was arrested; and a whole group of items that belonged to Harriet Tubman, including family photographs, a hymnal and the lace shawl that Mr. Bunch admired when touring the museum’s warehouse . During the 2008 presidential election the museum made a major effort to collect items related to Barack Obama’s historic campaign, from buttons and other paraphernalia to the entire contents of a campaign office in Falls Church, Va.

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A PLACE OF PROMINENCE The National Mall, site of the new African-American museum.Credit
Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

Even with a limited budget, Mr. Bunch is setting his sights high. He dreams of finding a sunken slave ship to raise from the ocean and restore to install in the museum, a project that could cost several million dollars.

The slavery exhibition is, in many ways, the most difficult part of the museum to fill with objects. Very few slave possessions survive, and many major documents relating to the era are already in other museums or private collections.

Mr. Rabinowitz, the co-curator of the exhibition, said that in addition to charting major historical events, the museum’s display will try to convey a vivid sense of slave culture, from religion and music to what people ate and how they entertained themselves.

“We’re not only interested in the Missouri Compromise, we’re not only interested in Harriet Tubman’s escape, we’re interested in how enslaved people lived day to day,” he said.

As an example, he explained how a simple iron pot, of the kind a slave woman might have used to cook rice for her family, could be the starting point for a discussion about food traditions brought over from Africa, the role of women in slave families and what life was like in a slave cabin.

“You can imagine the rice pot sitting and cooking for most of the day,” Mr. Rabinowitz said. “You have to try to evoke the quality of coming back and, even in the summertime, after a full day of work, it may be the last bits of twilight, and just having a chance to sit around that pot and to eat that food. Who’s it been prepared by? What’s said around that pot? You can really create a whole story around that.”

Tracing 2 Sides of History

The year 2015 may seem far away, but the decisions facing Mr. Bunch, his staff and his advisers make that deadline loom close. At the museum’s debut, the results of Mr. Bunch’s 10 years spent traveling the country will be put to the test. Whether the museum can fulfill the complex and in many ways contradictory demands on it — that it chronicle the nation’s appalling history of racial crimes, celebrate the survival and triumphs of African-American culture, and in the end leave visitors, after the museum equivalent of an emotional roller coaster, “healed” and at peace with history — will be seen when the doors actually open.

“There will be some people who will be disappointed,” Mr. Bunch predicted, but he said he would consider the museum successful “if we’ve married scholarship with an understanding of what our visitors know, want and expect.”

Then he invoked another audience — a demanding group in his mind, perhaps, but one less likely to voice disappointment.

“If my ancestors are smiling,” he said, “then I know we’ve done a good job.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Thorny Path to a National Black Museum. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe